


Imaged Womb of a Mercurial Winter

by Unpublished Draenog Glas Works (Hedgehog_Oatmeal)



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (Video Games), Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, Depression, Dysfunctional Family, Other, Poverty, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 16:18:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1694588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hedgehog_Oatmeal/pseuds/Unpublished%20Draenog%20Glas%20Works
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A novel I was about to start, but never did for reasons unknown to me. Basically imagine Sonic in a universe where Ray Bradbury's short story "All Summer in a Day" and the movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape had a freaky baby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imaged Womb of a Mercurial Winter

Frozen, like a stalactite in a frosty October morning cave! His tongue reached the sun’s frosty radiance, and it cannot save him, the snow piled upon him, the wicked mistress would freeze him and his heart, the rubied blood becoming as ice cold as the winter, the imaged womb had sickened him for so long, the winds crevassed him, touched him and froze his carapaces, and cry! Cry as much as he wants to! The winter will not soothe his pain. Mother Winter was never nice. A wicked old crone who wished to kill everyone’s happiness, as in this old town, no one was happy. When the blue sun rose in the starry morning like a spiderweb thickened with dew, he lost a piece of himself. A piece of himself he would never get back.

He once saw the poppies, the roses, the goldenrods and the violets bloom on this cruel planet. It seemed so long ago since it’s been spring. A spring only lasted for one clear day. Then, it snowed again. It always snowed. It snowed everywhere, and everyone sick and bruised of winter. The cold kissed their wounds, and made them more caustic, more dead than they already were. The sadness was infectious! Everyone was afflicted with depression in this cold world. Prozac and other antidepressants from the planet Earth were always in short supply, and even then, they never cured them like they hoped. They were always frosty with tears, the winter had always grasped them in their melancholy. It snowed so much that their vehicles could never go away from the Winter-Image-Womb. That’s what they called the planet, as it looked like a barren mother’s womb, when she had experienced post-partum depression, or had experienced a miscarriage. Women were sacred on the planet, as they had the power to bear children, but often, the winter had caused them to wring their necks, to crack them like eggs, to fry them on a cold pan. Babies were resources that were often rare. No one had children in this part of town. Population was decreasing, rapidly, as often many men and women had committed suicide, some locked up and barred in their mental hospitals that were always so full. The planet never had wars; everyone else was too busy warring with their own mind, too drugged up on medications, too busy with the schedules of the hospitals. The planet was quiet, it often spoke in whispers, and as soon as he woke up, he experienced a sense of loss, and he realized his mother was gone. She committed suicide by overdosing on 1000 mg. of Effexor.

His body felt the frozen fingers of this winter. He wrapped a thick blanket around himself, but it never was enough. Shivering, he carried a mug of hot cocoa from the human world of Earth. It couldn’t warm his heart. His blood felt frozen, and sometimes he wished he was dead. He had a prescription for Prozac, but couldn’t get another script until two months from now. Prozac was the popular medicine. The doctor asked if he wanted some Pristiq to wait for the Prozac, and he said no. Pristiq was the same as Effexor. Effexor killed my mother. She is rotting in her grave, right now, worrying about me, and I wonder if she ever will worry herself to nothing but anorectic skin and bones, cause the winter had frozen her organs perfectly in a little tight shell of fur and flesh. Perfect for the organ donors to get.

He didn’t want to go outside.

He never went outside for many years. His father kept himself locked up at work so he never had to go outside and motivate himself to go to work again.

He often was the perfect image of winter, and he hated it. Blue fur, clammy skin, green eyes that reminded them of the emerald ponds and lakes when it once was spring, and he was often alone, and woke up to the hateful sun and had lost something in his life. He once thought he lost some of his best friends in the world. He often thought he lost his family. His grandfather shot himself. His grandmother soon was claimed to be missing, probably never to be found. The winter had claimed many lives every year, and it soon was consuming him entirely, the frozen dragon chewing on his heart with its rimed teeth.

He was running out of cigarettes, yet…he had hated smoking. Many people died from smoking the long thin fingers of tobacco. It looked like winter. A branch covered in snow. And he made it burst into flames whenever he could, so he could never be reminded of his own mortality.

It had claimed the lives of too many people he cared about. He loved them. They tore his heart to pieces with icy needles. They lobotomized some people at the hospitals, with their fucking pricks that were stolen from the caves and vehicles. They stabbed them, chewed their brains, and made them happier than ever! Happy! They would sit and smile, look at the world, look at how wonderful it was! Hear the screeches of the wind! Smile! Feel the touch of the bitch’s womb! Smile! Taste the ice as they give out ice cream every day if you behaved! Smile! Smiling was a rare resource, and never had it been seen on the planet, except for those who were brain dead. They had a lot to be happy about. Because their life was over.

The cigarettes, the food, he often thought of those as a commodity that would soon run out. It was too cold to go outside. About -45 degrees. He had feared the cold, yet found himself opening a window, flickering a light on the cigarette, and then he smoked, when the wind had cried against him, had frozen his eyes, and his nose had ran a river down his chest.

His father sent him a letter, that said:

 

“Sonic,

 

Here in this letter is a check for 300 dollars. Get some groceries and whatever else you need. Watch out for the Arctic Apologist. He tries to win you over that he’s sorry for everything he’s ever done to this city, then he kills you with this thing called ‘euphoria’. We’re riddled with sadness, my son, but we don’t need help. What kind of fools would we be, being happy in a world like this? I often wish I can be like some of the others and travel to a planet that was warm all the time, but I can’t imagine myself happy. It’s ridiculous to be happy when I only get attention when I’m sad, when I’m only understood when I’m sad, when people have given me flowers from other planets cause I was sad. Son, it’s good to be sad sometimes. It’s great to be sad, cause I’m afflicted with a beautiful sadness right now and I couldn’t be any happier for being sad. I think of beautiful things when I’m sad sometimes. Sorry to remind you of your mother. She often couldn’t appreciate that sadness. I think of her too, and I think of returning to home sometime, but it’s very cold…So cold, that my fur coat I took from your mother’s grave when her body was frozen completely still reminds me of the guilt I have to feel for stealing the dead’s treasures. It’s not a very warm coat. It was from the human’s world, in a place called New York, in the 1920’s, a thing called ‘mink’.

 

This city is soon going to be deserted. We’re going to be the only ones left, my son. Everyone else is either committed in those overcrowded asylums or they killed themselves or they actually had the money to move to those nice planets. We don’t, unfortunately, even if I had the time to work overtime, but I spend that overtime worrying about you and your mother. I hope you’re not leaving either, Sonic. We can have our own city and we can even be kings here. No one cares. No new visitors had come to this planet in such a long time. Our civilization is dwindling down. Soon we’ll be survivors. Some stick around for the one day of spring, but I know they’re leaving too. This sun often makes us forget about those we used to love, and I learned that you shouldn’t love anyone, else you would never be sick with sadness. Kind people get sad, then they turn rotten like a meatloaf left in the fridge for too long. I hope this never happens to us. But I’m beginning to feel its effects of being hateful and not at all a kind person like your mother was. Sometimes being too kind makes you weak. And I hope you remember that.

 

This winter will run on for 278 more days, and then we will have our one day of spring. We will be happy. Then we will be plummeted to this world of depression again. Sometimes I wonder if I should kill myself. Those machines I often think of laying my body on them so I will die a terrible death. It happened to some employees. I’m running out of Paxil. They might be out of that medicine for a few months. Lots of people like that damn Paxil and Prozac. You’re fucked too it seems like.

 

Am I not making sense to you? Good. Now get some groceries so you don’t starve. Get some cigarettes too. And some coffee. I might see you on the one day of spring, but I’m not sure if I’ll make it. Paxil withdrawal sure is a damn bitch to get through if you know what I mean.

 

Sincerely,

 

I forgot my name when the sun rose up. I hope that’s not important. I guess from now on I’ll call myself Important.

 

Sincerely,

 

Important”

 

He sucked the cigarette like a lollipop and went outside, in his flimsy scarf and his runner’s jacket he got from one of his friends a long time ago. It was either starve to death or freeze to death. At least you hallucinated nice things when you froze.

The snow fell gently, but the sky was wrapped up in a gray blanket, the blue sun barely peeking. The wind had prickled his skin, his muscles and blood feeling like they would spill out from the winter’s breath. The flakes were diaphanous in the sun, the colors that shone like an opal. Winter was never beautiful to him. It was killing people. It was making people insane and being locked up in asylums. There were about three of them in this town, one a very high-class one and two other ones that were still built with steel and cinderblocks, and the windows were never made of Plexi-glass, but they were barred. His mother once was admitted in one of these asylums, and she liked it there she claimed, she felt safe inside, even if they were as cold as the winter outside.

Sonic often sneaked in candy from the vending machines to give to his mother. This time it was a Reese’s egg. It was just Easter from the human’s world, and they gave their leftover Easter candy to the other planets. How Easter often meant revival and a beautiful spring morning had made some patients depressed, but Sonic knew there was nothing he could do for them. Winter would keep blowing over in their land. The only holiday they never felt saddened by the human’s candy was Christmas, but only cause it snowed there too. Valentine’s Day was celebrated in the wards, but was often met with the kiss of suicide.

“I feel safe here, Sonic,” she said. “I don’t want to go back to the home. I want to stay here. They give me nice warm food, they give me kindness over my sadness, and I just…I’ve had issues with your father. You know he’s going mad with this winter too. He wants to stay and work all the time. He never wants to see me again. How pitiful. I gave him nice warm fish to eat and he never utters a thank you.”

The hospital staff handed out small cups of ice cream, with a little brown syrup inside the middle, claiming it was chocolate. And his mother ate it, not knowing it was actually a laxative, to help them shit as the food often made the patients constipated.

“You understand, don’t you, dear?”

“I don’t. I don’t know why you never want to come home and keep me company. I don’t want to be alone. I’m losing my friends, I’m losing…everything, mother. Losing you, losing dad, there’s only so much I can do inside the house. I tried to communicate with some online people, but they said I was too depressed. And the depressed people in the other planets are crazy. And I…just miss you, mom. I don’t want you to leave and stay in this crazy place. So many patients here are dying, bit by bit, and soon, new patients are coming in here, and then they’ll die off. They’re simply dying flowers in this cold place. They can’t take care of those flowers. They overfeed them, overwater them, until they commit suicide. Mother, you’ve got to get out of here…”

She smiled and nodded. “I’m happy here. I’m very happy here. You don’t understand that. I’m happy here.”

“VISITATION TIME IS OVER. ALL PATIENTS MUST RETURN TO THEIR RESPECTIVE WARDS.”

They both sounded robotic. The staff had wheeled his mother, who was becoming so overweight that she now had to be escorted with a wheelchair, and he saw how colorful the wards seemed to be, with their bright green and yellow paints and their little drawings of their “Sadness Monster” the staff and Mental Health Department had brainwashed them to believe. That there were little monsters that made them sad, made them want to kill themselves, so the only way to beat it was make arts and crafts and participate in group therapy. They seemed happy to live in this lie, until they soon took the doctor’s pens and jabbed them to their necks and had died from being stabbed in the jugular.

Mother is not happy there…Mother is not happy there…

The blue sun had soon cracked open the clouds. He could see the ultraviolet glare burning through his eyes. The sun was the ultimate culprit in this sadness. As the human’s sun had given them vitamin D, this sun had given them lack of dopamine and lack of knowledge and lack of sanity. The world was destined to be extinct as soon as it was discovered.

His fingers burned, as if they would snap off as the tree branch had curled around the cigarette, and dropped the small flame in the white canvas, let it grow cold in the snow. It was silent, the stars surrounded him, his heart had never felt so cold outside than when he finally ventured out. No one was outside other than him. The rest had been ushered and locked in their doors, trying to calm the kids after the death of their mother.

Like mother had died, a death he could never truly get over, as she choked on the expel of her vomit so quickly, as quickly as the man had taken his mother back to the ward after she occupied the bathroom for several hours, where she soon swallowed 1,000 mg. of Effexor, the drug that was supposed to help her, had murdered her in her sleep. She claimed it was a mercy killing. The medicines were never locked in the ward, and often, they handed out Valium and Klonopin to ease the patients back in their chairs and watch the world go by. They still watched the world become more frozen as the snow had collected. Sonic could see some shouting to give them more of his medications, as the bitch nurses had never given them enough. He wanted to hold their hands, to tell them everything would be fine as in 278 days there would be a spring where they would be happy, but he worried about them ripping off his arm and chewing on it like dogs in a pound that no one wanted cause they were too damn depressed and crazy.

Dogs, all of them were dogs. None of them huskies or Alaskan malamutes. They all wished to die. They wished to consume the hand of death with their red bloody mouths. They cried for the poppies and violets to return. They wanted to see what the flowers looked like in so long, they wanted to taste them, feel their velvety petals. Sonic had never seen the one day of spring. He was still inside his home, listening to his father rant that they needed Sonic’s mother, even if she was fat and old and decrepit by the hospital. The feathers of albino peacocks still had fell for all what seemed to be one hour, when the sun became intensely warm on his fur, and he had to stop his heater to warm the insides of the home, and his father forbid him to come out, cause they were an embarrassment, as his mother was becoming so overweight that she often laid in an extra-sized bed as she listened to the radio play nothing but Christmas tunes to try and cheer the patients up, and she kept chiming that she was happy to hear the jingle bells ring, because it meant she was happy, while the other patients gawked at her large size and claimed she often plugged the toilet with her shit.

“Yet you don’t want to take her to the doctors. You feel so embarrassed that you don’t want to do that,” Sonic replied.

“I can’t bear to look at her anymore. I never remembered marrying a woman that…you know…” He was afraid to use the dreaded “f word”. “…Big. And you enable her, Sonic. You keep giving her candy, you keep giving her milkshakes, you keep giving her all these fatty foods that you know isn’t good for her. But every time we give her a salad or something, she doesn’t eat it. She would rather just eat…”

“That’s why, even though I love her, dad, I just gave up. She refuses to eat what’s good for her and she’s incredibly depressed so I might as well give her food that will give her a few minutes of happiness. She always loved food. She was a good cook before we suddenly became…depressed.”

“But if she actually eats what’s right for her, she would be happy, Sonic! She has an addiction, and you’re just enabling her!”

“You gave her some Hershey’s kisses just the other day, so you can’t blame this entirely on me.”

“Well, it was because it’s a tradition! I give her Hershey’s kisses (The peppermint kind that the humans give us every time it isn’t Christmas there anymore!) to give her, well, a ‘kiss’! You know we’ve always done that!”

“And the Reese eggs the humans give us too, the Reese trees, the Reese hearts…”

“Oh God! There you go again! Thinking you’re better than everyone else, Mr. Sonic! Why don’t you just lay me on my bed and let me die for Christ’s sake!”

It wasn’t rare for his father to often fall in hysterics when they were arguing. It was the snow. The winter. They knew it. The blue sun. His father continued to ramble that it was never their fault their mother was sick, it was the humans, oh! How disgusting they were! Giving us all this candy! This high fructose shit! Sonic could feel the sun beating on his skin and fur, the sweat dropping off like little clear pearls on his father’s head, and he kissed him as he laid him on his bed, wrapped him up tight with their wool blanket, and he said, “Goodnight, father”.

And spring came, and went. And Sonic never experienced brief happiness while he put his father to sleep, like a disobedient child.

Winter had roared again, as the fires were revived in the hearth. The snow bellowed, and he could sense how cold it was again. The winter monster had come again with its bristled icicle claws and had claimed yet another sane person’s brain. His father rolled in his sleep, had rambled and consummated the soup that Sonic dangled above him, the small little red drops of tomato bisque falling on his tongue and head and nose. Why can’t mother eat like this? He wondered. Why can’t she eat like a little miserable worm instead of becoming a big fat queen, ready to give birth to so many sons and daughters and fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers. She was the machine that continued to give birth. And kill her children. She fried them, and the fetus was often like a crippled sack of fluid that couldn’t sprout life from its cells. She threw the fetus away, in the cold Winter 4 morning. To humans, it was April. To them, it was only winter number four.

No fun was to be had in the snow. He never saw snow angels. He never saw snowball fights. It was too cold for that. Winter had continued to suck in their lives, the little flames they had inside their souls, wilted away, the spring that would never be, as the snow had rushed around him, had claimed him, and he could hear the distant sounds of the other villagers talk about how it was another night for the Arctic Apologist to come, oh how he would come and make us feel guilty that we were living in the best of winters, and the worst of winters was in the human’s world of Siberia, Russia. He hears the Communist bells ring, as civilization soon became so advanced that it couldn’t handle the rush of the villager’s madness, the shoot of mercury in their brain. They ate over fires that barely enticed them to warmth, they talked of bringing a new world order where they could change the planet and make the sun become distant, and they would become like Mercury, and have a warm sun over them all the time, where it was nothing but summer all year and only winter for one day every year. A day that Mercurians had loved, as the sun often hung over them like a crucified Christ.

The tears had sprouted, with much edifice and much leaves flowing down his wrists. Inside him was spring, but never before, had he felt completely like winter. He held on, he kept going, despite the mother’s suicide, the father’s manic insanity. He locked himself away from all contact for many months. Many Winter 1s and Winter 2s and 3s and 5s and 6s and 7s and 8s. Only eight months in a year. And all of them were winters, with no difference between any of them, except Winter 8 held the lovely flower in its clutches near its cold breasts, but the milk was often rotten when he came to taste it.

He held the dagger deftly in the air, blood still reeking from it. He killed a Trumpet just a few months ago, for food. They were dangerous, with their horns that were splintered like swords, their songs often fatalizing, their hooves diamond-studded stars that could prick open an eye and smash it completely with its weight. They looked like deers in the human world, children had often fawned over them, but they were dangerous, despite often dying by being smashed by a vehicle’s grill. Often snow had drifted into their swords, and they looked so lovely, they looked like little rivers of silver when he often gawked at them, veins of winter, the blood of winter, the arteries and heart of winter, they were often the symbol of Image-Winter-Womb, and the reason tourists came to this godforsaken place and soon cried that they were sad and wanted to go home. And as the blue sun rose, they forgot about the definition of “home”. So they stayed here. And they grew miserable, and withered. And as godforsaken as here.

The knife had stabbed the crystals that came from the sky, and he ate them, licked them, to keep his hydration in control. The store was miles away, in another city, rife of other mental hospitals, other sick people, and he ate the last of the Trumpet’s meat he carried with him. They still made excellent jerky to take on those trips, even if their meat was too dry compared to the human’s deer back on Earth.

His boots waned through the ice. The lights seemed distant, amoebic sapphires as they glared in his eyes. The others warned him that the Arctic Apologist would come. He had to ignore them. His hunger had overwhelmed his thirst for knowledge.

He believed he was stepping in his mother’s grave, her body still crystallized from the snow, the frost, and he wished he said goodbye and had given her a hug in her flabby chest and arms and her big, gluttinous lips, one last time.

 


End file.
